Ok, people....aside from the singing, what did you think of the Traviata staging?

The minimalist Salvatore Dali-esque set was crisp, striking, and a great background for highlighting the movement of the singers. The staging was clever, including turning the mixed chorus into a male chorus by dressing the women as men, all of them in black so that the only spot of color on the stage was the heroine's red dress. But as well done as all that was, it was in no way appropriate to La Traviata. It just didn't fit AT ALL. I too started to long for a conventional staging...rather quickly, in fact.

I liked the design, but Chris is right...it didn't fit. It seemed sterile and at odds with so passionate an opera as Traviata. What bothered me more was how haggard Natalie Dessay looked. Good for the role, but not so good for the singer.

It was a stingy kind of set. Impressive at first glance, but not at all satisfying as the opera went on. What was the doctor doing hovering around through all four acts? He sings maybe two lines in the last act and that's all. Was he supposed to be some harbinger of death?

I didn't realize he was the doctor until the last act...I assumed he was death hanging around waiting for the clock to strike. And there seems to be general agreement here that, while the staging was effective, it was not Traviata...

When I first saw him, I thought: "Is that her doctor? He's not in this act!" But when Violetta first approached him, stage left, he was so indifferent to her suffering that I started thinking he was the figure of Death instead. Then he turned out to be the doctor after all. Hmmph.

But what he really was, was the opera's florist. When Alfredo makes his declaration of love to Violetta, she hands him a flower and tells him to return when the flower has withered. (O ciel! Domani!) So where did that flower come from? There were no flowers on that stark set, no vase to hold them if there were, no table to hold the vase. That's why the doctor was onstage; someone had to give Violetta that flower. And it wouldn't do to have him lurking around in the first act and then just disappear, so he continued his lurking ways right to the end and even gave Violetta another flower somewhere along the way. But in the time the two lovers had together in the country, what was the pattern of their sofa throws and robes? Flowers!

I've never seen a performance of Traviata that included "O mio rimorso", and that's a shame; it's not long and wouldn't add much to performance time. It seemed to me part of the gambling scene was cut in Saturday's performance.

Wouldn't you think that Violetta would have more than one party dress? But we now know Alfredo wears boxers and not briefs.

That set was something of an optical illusion. I thought it was a painted stage curtain at first. Then a door opened and Violetta walked out onto what looked like a steeply curved floor and my jaw dropped. I loved it...for the rest of the first act. But I was thoroughly sick of it by the end of the opera. The only variation was those flowery throws in the second act, and they were just messy on that pristine set. But the opera sounded great even if it didn't look right.